Wireline and wireless internet protocol (IP) networks have traditionally supported a best effort delivery of all traffic. To support enhanced services, multiple types, or classes, of services have been established and assigned certain quality of service (QoS) parameters that manage queues for each service type. The QoS parameters include delay, jitter, error rates, and throughput and can be provisioned on a per IP connection or per flow basis through mechanisms such as resource reservation protocol (RSVP) or can be provisioned on aggregate flows which are classified into service classes. The IP QoS architecture provides tools for marking IP flows, controlling and shaping the traffic of various IP flows, and managing various IP queues in order to ensure QoS behavior for each class of service. Queue management algorithms include head-drop, tail-drop, first in first out (FIFO) and random early detect (RED). Internet service providers (ISPs) can utilize the service classes, their associate QoS behavior, and QoS provisioning to provide multiple service offerings to their business and consumer customers.
Recent proposals for the IP QoS architecture include supporting bandwidth brokers that control and allocate internet or other network bandwidth. The bandwidth brokers can be programmed with an organization's policies, current allocation traffic, and new requests for allocations. The bandwidth brokers manage the allocations of bandwidth within their network domain and communicate with bandwidth brokers of other network domains to negotiate QoS parameters.
Wireless communication networks use the IP QoS architecture to support the transmission of data and/or voice traffic between mobile devices and a wireline network. Mobile devices may be located within the wireless network by the use of global positioning satellite (GPS) approaches and other wireless network based approaches.
Proposals for IP QoS on wireless networks have focused on combating the error-prone wireless links. For example, ensuring efficient transport control protocol (TCP) performance over an error-prone wireless links as well as renegotiating QoS parameters and reallocating resources as error rates and/or other error link performance values degrade. The IP QoS architecture for wireless networks, however, does not efficiently allocate bandwidth to mobile devices that move within the coverage area and that cause interference with one another depending on their relative locations in the network.